Can Platform Cooperatives Empower Everyday Workers?

Last week, I wrote about OuiShare, a European organization that’s spearheading the push for a more equitable sharing economy. One of the concepts on the agenda at this year’s OuiShare Fest is “platform cooperativism” — the idea that worker-owned cooperatives could replace corporate-owned networks and apps.

Last November, Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider hosted the first conference on platform cooperativism at The New School. The conference proposed that:

“Online platforms often exploit and exacerbate existing inequalities in society, even while promising to be the great equalizers. Could the Internet be owned and governed differently? What if Uber drivers could set up their own platform, or if cities could control their own version of Airbnb?”

The concept is gaining momentum both online and offline. The Nation writes that Worker Cooperatives Are More Productive Than Normal Companies:

“It’s not a utopian vision but a growing daily reality for many enterprises. A close analysis of the performance of worker-owned cooperative firms—companies in which workers share in management and ownership—shows that, compared to standard top-down firms, co-ops can be a viable, even superior way of doing business.”

Worker-owned companies still make up just a fraction of the U.S. economy. The U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives reports that there are only about 400, “employing around 7,000 people and generating over $400 million in annual revenues.” But as more and more workers turn to temp work and the gig economy to make a living, they’re beginning to call for a more dependable business model.

New co-ops like Transunion Car Service and Green Taxi are creating their own union-backed versions of the Uber app. In New York City, an app called Coopify hopes to consolidate several local co-ops, allowing customers to access child care and home cleaning. These apps would pay workers a living wage, without sending a cut of the profits to Silicon Valley.

One platform, called Stocksy, applies this principle to stock photography:

“Publications that want to use an image from Stocksy pay a fee raging from $10 –$500. Fifty percent of that goes directly to the photographer. That’s a much fairer commission than the 20 percent paid out by the corporate service Getty Images, according to photographer and Stocksy member Thomas Hawk. That’s not the only reason Hawk left Getty for Stocksy in 2013. ‘The exciting part,’ he writes on his personal blog, is that ‘the members of Stocksy actually own the agency.’ Stocksy reflects this by distributing 90 percent of its profits—which are handled separately from commissions—directly to artists.”

The number of cooperative apps are growing. Loconomics aims to be a worker-owned version of TaskRabbit. Fairmondo is an eBay for ethical goods based in Europe. And Resonate is a music streaming service in which “I have one share and you have one share,” according to founder Peter Harris:

Will this be an effective way to take the technological advances made by companies like Airbnb, Uber, and even Spotify and distribute them more fairly to workers? At The Week, Jeff Spross thinks it will:

“We may be seeing a tipping point, where America’s transformation into a service economy is intersecting with new technology to make worker-owned cooperatives viable on a scale they weren’t before. If you’re looking to push back against the dark side of the sharing economy, this might be a start.”

Have you ever been part of a worker-owned company? Which services would you like to see re-envisioned as platform cooperatives?